Don't Be Frightened Of It

He had a notepad.

Not a phone, not a laptop. A proper notepad, with a pen laid across the top of it. He’d been waiting. The new iMac was still in its box on the table — unopened, which I still find remarkable — and the moment I plugged the two machines together and kicked off the migration, out came the pad.

“Please,” he said, “can I ask you some questions?”

That’s what I’m here for.

He was a retired chartered accountant. Eighty-two, eighty-three. Sharp as anything, ran the quiz night for the whole retirement village, the resident treasurer and still managing spreadsheets like he’d never stopped working. The questions started with the new operating system — what can it do that the last one couldn’t — and then moved, methodically, down the list. Until he got to AI.

“What is it?” he said. “And should I be worried about it?”

I thought about it for a second. Then I said: you’re an accountant. You’ve spent your life in spreadsheets. Take one of your spreadsheets — or several — upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to analyse them. Ask it questions. See what it says. You’ll find it can do a lot of what you used to do, and do it quickly, and it won’t complain about the formatting.

He wrote that down.

I told him it was also a better place to start than Google if he wanted a proper deeper answer to something. Not a list of links — an actual answer. It thinks. It explains. It gives you something you can push back on.

“Use it for everything,” I said. “Don’t be frightened of it. It’s very powerful and it’ll make you more accurate, not less.”

More notes.

“Even the quiz,” I said. “It’ll write you twenty questions and answers in thirty seconds. They won’t all be right. But that’s where you come in. It does the heavy lifting, you do the editing.”

He looked up from the pad. “That’s rather good,” he said.

The Gap Nobody Is Filling

I think about that conversation a lot, actually. Because he’s not unusual. He’s representative. There are thousands of people exactly like him in retirement — competent, experienced, intellectually curious, with decades of professional skill and absolutely no one around them giving them a straight answer about what AI actually is and what it can actually do for someone their age.

The conversation they’re usually getting, if they’re getting one at all, is either too technical or too vague or it just creates a deep fake of someone famous. Nobody is sitting in their flat over a migrating iMac saying: you’re an accountant, here’s exactly how this tool applies to your life.

That’s the gap. It’s not a small one.

How the Day Ended

The iMac finished migrating. Word had a fight with itself and eventually lost. The printer worked first time. His wife came in and offered me lunch, which I declined twice before she pointed out she could tell by my face that I wanted to accept, and she was right, and the baguettes were excellent.

As a shrewd business man the customer traded half of my time for his old iMac, I wiped all the data of his after checking he had all his data on the new iMac and the backups where in place, then on the way out I carried the old iMac to the van. It took a while but was made easier as you can’t beat spring in England especially in a well manicured estate like this one.

Neville Denness runs Spurdotech — mobile Mac support across East Sussex. Home visits, small businesses, and the occasional retired accountant with a notepad.